1. mixingmemory
  2. The Media and Female Body Image

The Media and Female Body Image

By mixingmemory on May 13, 2008.

There's a paper by Grabe, Ward, and Hyde in this month's issue of Psychological Bulletin that presents a meta-analysis of 77 studies (correlational and experimental) on the relationship between the media's presentation of (overly) thin women and women's body image issues (from the shrink rap). The studies used a host of measures of body image, including measures of things like perceived body shape, anoretic cognition, body dissatisfaction, thin-ideal internalization, restrained eating, "bulimic symptomatology," appearance self-esteem, etc. For the relationship between media presentations of thin women and these various constructs, the average effect sizes ranged from -.28 to -.39, indicating small to moderate relationships.

If you have a subscription, you can read the paper here. Unfortunately, I can't find a free version of the paper anywhere, but if you really want to read it (remember, meta-analyses are boring as hell), send me an email.

Tags
Uncategorized

More like this

Combating Injury with Information: Gender Differences in Cognition
I was at a wedding this weekend, and I was getting in one of those conversations that drunk people get into at weddings: what are the gender differences in cognition? OK, so maybe you don't get into conversations like this with people you don't know well, but I do. Anyway, it got me thinking…
Janet Hyde and Marcia Linn on the Psychological Similarity between Men and Women
In my previous post arguing for the relatively large psychological similarity between men and women -- in great contrast to the public conception -- I drew heavily on the work of Janet Hyde, a professor of Psychology at Berkeley. Now Janet Hyde and Marcia Linn have published an editorial and review…
Is yoga better than other exercise for boosting self-esteem?
In our little college town, one of the most popular fitness trends over the past few years has been yoga. Friends and acquaintances often suggest we join them in their favorite class, claiming not only that we'll get stronger and more flexible, but that we'll feel better about ourselves. But Greta…
Terror Management Theory On Women, the Body, Sex, and Children
At some point, terror management theorists are going to attempt to explain everything in the universe with their theory (I suspect we'll see a paper titled "Mortality Salience and the Bose-Einstein Condensate" in the next few years). Since I've already talked about terror management theory work on…

Hi,

Thanks for alerting people to this interesting piece of research. I'm going to be doing an episode for my podcast on body image. If you could send me a copy that would be great. Appreciate it.

Michael

this article helps me a lot in doing my reaction paper. nice..

By mi amore pot, (not verified) on 02 Aug 2008 #permalink

Could you please send me this paper to smgalleg@asu.edu. Im working on research related to body image. Thanks!